Blackout Worse For Internet Than Previously Thought?

An anonymous reader writes "Renesys (the people who previously brought you cool animated graphs of the US/Canada power outage has a new report out. It challenges the widely held belief that the Internet was largely unaffected by the power outage. Lots of important networks lost connectivity, including banks, hospitals, government organizations and investment funds. There's a cool appendix on the huge Italian power outage in September as well. They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure."

Comments

worked just fine here during blackout

[bbn]

I live in denmark and recently we had a blackout that lasted maybe 10 hours.

While I was unable to make any phone calls, I could get on the internet with GPRS and surf to our server with my laptop for as long as the laptop batteries lasted.

The server is hosted in a colo datacenter which was also in the middle of the affected area. We run a mud on the server, and most of the players are from USA. They never discovered the blackout as the datacenter went on emergency diesel backup and apparently knew to make business with backbone providers that also knew their stuff.

So to the people saying that internet can only route around blackout areas but not _through_ them, this is not true. Seems at least here in denmark all the infrastructure on the backbones got backup power and just keeps working when everyone else is busy lighting candles.

Re:And the power system is?

[Rick.C]

Pointing out that areas without power didn't have internet connectivity seems rather redundant to me.

For home users and small businesses, you are quite right. What about large businesses that invested in generators so they could stay online 24/7? They were prepared to remain online to conduct their business. They depended on the Internet and it failed them.

I work for a large bank. We were not hit by the power outage, but we were scrambling to find routes around the areas that were.